The Nation; Pious in Public and Proud of It

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Published: December 4, 1994

AMERICA is a nation where public expressions of religion seem always to be in season.

Across the country, city councils begin the most routine business sessions with an invocation. Athletes, fresh from the warfare of the playing field, bow heads and join hands in the locker room as they would in a church. And the vigilance of civil libertarians notwithstanding, creches still pop up on public property at Christmastime.

Such open displays of piety may prompt Europeans to scratch their heads, even to snicker at what appears to be religion at its most superficial. Certainly, all this would look odd, maybe even politically suspect, in places like London, Berlin or Madrid. But public acknowledgement of the divine remains an integral part of life in much of America.

Forget the supposed lessons of the 1960's: The high tide of secularism then was more characteristic of that decade than indicative of the future. Talk of God being dead sounded loudest in academia and the press, not on Main Street, much less in its pews. The courts helped drive a mood of disestablishment with rulings against school prayer, but outright secularism never gained much of a constituency in the nation at large. Belief in Miracles

To be sure, some historic Protestant denominations, like the Presbyterians and Episcopalians, suffered big drops in membership, but other groups, particularly Baptists and Pentecostals, surged. These days, with a new millennium approaching, mass-circulation magazines declare a growing interest in matters spiritual -- angels, prayer, miracles, messages from the other side and more. And the oft-heard story in church circles is that those who lost their religion as adolescents and young adults are coming back as parents, to worship with their children.

"You have to realize that America is, of the most advanced industrial nations, the most religious," said Robert N. Bellah, professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and an author of "Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life" (HarperCollins). "The amount of time and money people give to religion is enormous."

Sixty-two cents of every charitable dollar given by individuals annually goes to religious institutions, said Virginia Hodgkinson, vice president for research at Independent Sector, a coalition of charities, foundations and corporations that tracks trends in giving and volunteering.

A poll released last year by a consortium of social science research centers showed that, among the dozen technologically advanced nations surveyed, belief in God was highest in the United States and Ireland. The International Social Survey Program poll, which tabulated responses from 19,000 people, found Americans scoring higher than most in church attendance, belief in an afterlife and the conviction that God truly cares about individuals.

From the results, the pollsters suggested that religious belief in the United States, Ireland and Poland might well be higher than ever.

In this country, popular piety has been nourished by the very fact that it is voluntary, say those who study religion and law. The First Amendment's establishment clause bars the Federal Government from promoting any particular faith. Thus, religious observance has flourished where none is required, and the expression of faith has avoided the taint of links with narrow political or class interests.

"Here, it's every man for himself," said James Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington. "It's a free market."

But if they created a government barred from sponsoring religious rites, why do so many Americans still seem to favor and accept a public display of faith? What to make of the United States Senate opening its sessions with an invocation, or a group of civic and business leaders pausing at a ground-breaking for prayer from a local minister?

"It's an effort by religious people to do their mild thing in public," said James Wall, editor of The Christian Century, a weekly magazine. "I think it's a positive result of not having a state church."

It is linked with something more than that, too. Americans have historically seen in religious practice a key to maintaining civic virtue.

Many of the Founding Fathers were deists -- believing that God creates life and then takes no further part in the affairs of humankind and nature -- and some like Thomas Jefferson played decisive roles in breaking the legal ties of historic churches to the states. But they saw a public value in citizens' exercising their religious beliefs.

George Washington -- who spoke of a deity in the most impersonal language -- said as much in his Farewell Address in 1797. "And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion," the President said. "Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." Ethics, Morality and Religion

Four decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville found similar sentiments widely shared. "The Americans show by their practice that they feel the high necessity of imparting morality to democratic communities by means of religion," he wrote.

This has never been a complicated business. In the United States, interest in theological nuance and denominational distinctions tends to be limited at best. The prayers that get uttered around public events focus on basic concepts -- the supremacy of God or Scripture's pre-eminence as a source of ethics.

In his research for "Habits of the Heart," Dr. Bellah said he encountered many people who eschewed any formal religious label but who nonetheless spoke of themselves as people of faith. "People would say, I'm not religious, but I'm very spiritual," he said.

In a sense, Dr. Bellah said, these people spoke out of a venerable national tradition, one exemplified by presidential inaugural addresses, in which the nation's leaders have invariably invoked the deity, but at the same time have carefully avoided religious distinctions.

A general acknowledgment of God's presence -- or that of Providence or a Higher Power -- may sound vague, even shallow. But to many people, it packs a meaning.

Americans "are a religious people, so we look to express ourselves religiously," Mr. Wall said. That desire, he added, is often no more than "to express what is of a general nature," maybe something so simple as "the relevance of God."